Crossing boundaries
Remembering Anne Marie Schimmel
Anees Jung

FOR Anne Marie Schimmel it was not the red of Islam that mattered but the green, the colour of peace and compassion, the colour that evokes sanctity, the language of poetry. To this frail, sweet-faced German woman the connection with Islam was a life-long passion, as deep as her own roots in a Lutheran faith. The rituals of lighting candles and singing in the church choir were as dear to her as bowing in prayer at the Sufi shrines in India, Pakistan, Turkey and Afghanistan where she travelled regularly on her kind of pilgrimage. Sitting in Bonn, she dreamed of Bijapur and Bidar, talked of her friend Allan Fakir in Sindh and brooded over the problem of selecting a site for her burial in a graveyard in Sindh, as she was a woman. Today Anne Marie Schimmel perhaps lies in the earth beside her male Sufi mentors. This deeply mystic woman, the world's most renowned scholar on Sufism passed away in Germany recently. As gently as she had lived.

"When you are in Bonn come to my fakir khana," she said when I greeted her after a luminous lecture she delivered in Delhi a few years ago. I asked her if I could have a copy of it. "It is not written," she smiled. I had presumed it was as her eyes were focused on the wooden desk where I thought she had put the printed sheets. The focus I realised was not on a paper but deep inside herself.

What she was saying was drawn straight from her heart. As she traced the story of Islam one sensed its early beginnings, like a stream first, then a river gathering the force of a torrent and merging finally into an ocean. "We owe to the early Arabs some of the basic concepts we

know today," she said. "The Arabic numbers, names like Zenith and nadir, the stars that shine in heaven, words like alchemy that evokes a magic and alcohol that is the finest of essence." From her laser-like memory poured out stories of saints and scientists and Sufis who were deeply affected by Islam. Listening to her I felt not only informed but holy. The sacred month

of Ramzan found a true meaning. She talked about Ramon Lull, the Catalan who in his missionary novel tried to forge an understanding between the three great faiths of his time—Judaism, Christianity and Islam. He wrote 366 sentences of divine love drawn from Arabic mystical sources and hailed the Arab way of starting every work with the word Bismillah, in the name of God.

It was in Spain again where lived Ibn Arabi, the great philosopher who introduced the term 'unity of being'. He was condemned by some as a pantheist but welcomed by others among them the Sufis of Kashmir who combined his philosophy with their own tantra. She talked about Dara Shikoh who translated the Upanishads in Persian from Sanskrit with the help of a group of pandits. Had this great humanist lived the history of India would have been different she stated.

Watching the enormous influence of Sufism around the world Schimmel was heartened. Also amused to see advertisements for Sufi dancing classes on US campuses. "Little do they know that the classical Sufis were against dancing," she added with a laugh. "In culture the rules of traffic have changed. The givers and the takers have to be open to the best in each other for no civilisation today can afford to close its doors."

When I visited her home on a shady street in Bonn it was far from the fakir khana that she had humbly described. It was a home of treasures. Old carpets and embroideries informed one of the lands she had travelled, where crafts and Sufism flourished hand in hand; books lined on shelves, spilled over tables and chairs, each of which she had known and read. "Today is a mubarak day," she said. It was on October 20 of l937 when she first decided to learn Arabic.

Why Islam I asked her. Sipping a pale sherry, "necessary to reach the state of ilhaam" she smiled and said: "I would not have perhaps turned to it if I did not have an inner calling." Both her parents were deeply religious.

There was something in the very air of the place where she grew up that worked on her inner yearning and helped give expression. She grew up in Arfut, a medieval town in East Germany, the home of Martin Luther, in a landscape as much enriched by gothic cathedrals as by gardens full of roses and dahlias. On the birthday of Martin Luther thousands of children including Anne Marie would march up to the place with lanterns that they had made themselves where Luther had taken a vow to become a monk. They would sing church hymns and come back home and receive marzipan sweets. Those echoes remained with her throughout her life. Going to church at times and enjoying the beauty of ritual and music did not make her more Christian just

as talking about the compassion of Islam did not make her sympathetic to fundamentalists. One could best understand her belief from the verse of an Indian poet whom she quoted. The parwana or the moth circles around the flame of the candle under it burns itself out, not caring whether the candle is of the Kaaba or the temple. She saw God everywhere.

In her book Deciphering Signs of God she quotes an ayat from the Koran which explains that God shows His signs in the horizon and in ourselves. "Each one must look around and try to find that sign. You may see a tree in bloom or see something terrible. That too is God's majesty, his jalal. He is not only beautiful but also powerful, visible in everything if you have the eyes to see." Schimmel's vision was expansive, embracing in its grasp the freedom of being that includes the right to free thought and speech. These can not be isolated and fought for with aggression or violence which she felt were antithetical to the spirit of Islam. The militancy of fundamentalists was a

political but not a spiritual phenomenon. Schimmel was as distant from their kind of Islam as is the arch of heaven is from the turmoil of this scarred earth. For a seeker like her God was everywhere.

"Have you heard the story of Rabia, the sufi saint of Baghdad who carried in one hand a torch and in the other a pitcher?" she asked me, braving the spring rain on her last visit to Delhi. I was escorting her to the shrine of Fatima Saam, India's only female saint. Removing her shoes at the tiny iron gate she walked barefoot and stood by the painted green grave, her hands cupped in a gesture of prayer. As she recited the fateha I sensed that her accent was purer than mine. Perhaps also her faith`85.

A recent well documented report on the impact of violence on public health has confirmed that women suffer the most from high levels of violence in the present day world. This report titled ‘World Report on Violence and Health’ (WRVH) has been prepared by the World Health Organisation (WHO).

Perhaps the worst aspect of this violence is the extent to which women become the victims of violent acts by their own husbands or ‘intimate partners’.

In 48 population based surveys from around the world, between 10 per cent and 69 per cent of women reported being physically assaulted by an intimate male partner as some point in their lives. For many of these women, physical assault was not an isolated event, but part of a continuing pattern of abusive behaviour.

In a national survey of violence against women in Canada, one-third of all women who had been physically assaulted by a partner said that they had feared for their lives at some point in the relationship. Violence can sometimes continue and may even escalate after a woman leaves her partner. Studies from Australia, Canada, Israel, South Africa and the USA say that 40 to 70 per cent of female murder victims were killed by their husbands or boyfriends, frequently in the context of an ongoing abusive relationship.

Studies have shown that about 20 to 70 per cent of abused women never told another person about the abuse until they were interviewed for the study. Violence also occurs during pregnancy, adversely affecting not only the woman but also the developing fetus. Studies in Canada, Chile, Egypt and Nicaragua have found that 6 to 15 per cent of ever-partnered women have been physically or sexually abused during pregnancy, usually by their partners. A recent study among 400 villages and seven hospitals in Pune found that 16 per cent of all deaths during pregnancy were the result of partner violence.

In Canada, 43 per cent of women who were physically abused by a partner received medical care and 50 per cent had to take time off from work. Several studies link a host of ailments (physical and mental) among women with physical or sexual abuse. Women abused by partners face an increased risk of suicide or suicide attempts.

In the state of Uttar Pradesh (India), the percentage of men who admitted to beating their wives varied from 18 per cent in Nanital district to 45 per cent in Banda district. The proportion that physically forced their wives to have sex varied from 14 per cent to 36 per cent among the districts.

In a recent study in rural Uganda, women who reported being forced to have sex against their will in the previous year had an eightfold increased risk of becoming infected with HIV. Between 21 to 25 per cent of women reported having been the victim of either an attempted or completed rape by a partner in their lifetime in studies at five places (in parts of England, Mexico, Nicaragua, Peru and Zimbabwe).

A lot of women victims of rape face double injustice as they are also punished for bringing disgrace to their families/clans. A study of female deaths by murder in Alexandria, Egypt, found that 47 per cent of the women were killed by a relative after they had been raped.

Nearly half of the sexually active adolescent women in a multi-country study in the Caribbean reported that their first sexual intercourse was forced. In Lima, Peru, 40 per cent of young women reported forced sexual initiation.

Each year, hundreds of thousands of women and girls throughout the world are bought and sold into prostitution or sexual slavery. Many are tortured. Sex workers face a high risk of physical and sexual violence. A survey of sex workers in Bangladesh revealed that 49 per cent had been raped and 59 per cent beaten by the police in the previous year. A report prepared by the World Organisation against Torture suggested that over 200,000 Bangladeshi women had been trafficked between 1990 and 1997.

Reports of rapes during violent conflicts in recent decades have been documented from Bosnia, Bangladesh, Liberia, Rwanda, Uganda and elsewhere. Estimates of the number of women raped in Bosnia and Herzegovina during the conflict between 1992 and 1995 range from 10,000 to 60,000.

According to WRVH, the available evidence shows that victims of domestic and sexual violence have more health problems, significantly higher health care costs and more frequent visits to emergency departments throughout their lives than those without a history of abuse.